When Should We Start Practising Kicking?

There is another question I was asked in the seminar, “When should we start to practice kicking?” We should actually start practicing from the very beginning, but we should focus on developing the strength of a leg not actually kicking. Wing Chun does not suggest kicking higher than the waist. Why is this? This is because the higher we kick the more chance our opponent can catch our kicking leg and also the weaker we are on our standing leg whilst kicking and this is very dangerous. In reality, during a fight a person could catch your leg and sweep your standing leg, so in order to be good at kicking we must have a good stance and in particular a good, strong one leg stance. Then when we are standing on one leg we are strong and we will not easily lose our balance. We should be strong enough that even if somebody tries to kick or sweep our leg we can still hold it a little. If our standing leg is strong then the kicking leg will be very strong. However, having said all of this we must have good Chī Sáu 黐手 techniques. We should focus on our hands for at least three years without kicking. After this we can learn all kinds of Wing Chun kicking but we must still follow the principle of Wing Chun.